


Portrait of the wicked witch as a young girl

by deliverusfromsburb



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Game Over Timeline, Gen, almost all canon compliant, cameos by the other beta kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-11-21
Packaged: 2018-09-01 05:39:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8610814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deliverusfromsburb/pseuds/deliverusfromsburb
Summary: A Jade character study of sorts





	

**Author's Note:**

> If I'm going to be moving old stuff over from my tumblr, it's a crime not to have any Jade stuff up. That's my brand, after all. Anyway, based off this post: http://deliverusfromsburb.tumblr.com/post/73418972215/au-where-jade-harley-is-very-young-and-dreams-of-a

They say every molecule in your body is replaced in seven years. You do it twice in under seven hours.

This bothers you a little, because it seems to break several scientific laws, but you remind yourself that those laws were made by people and the universe doesn’t have to listen to anyone. (Except you.)

You wonder sometimes if you are the same Jade Harley as you ever were, just with dog ears, a craving for rare steak, and dreams of people you’ve never met with dead white eyes. Or maybe something bled out of you on that cracked stone slab that you are never getting back.

“Don’t you think we’re a little weird?” you ask John one day, a few months into your journey on the golden ship.

He's floating on his stomach watching television. When you speak, he flips upside down with a kind of gangly grace and looks at you with his hair flopping into his eyes. “We’re totally weird,” he says cheerfully. “And we’re awesome. Did I tell you I made us out of slime?”

“Yes, you mentioned it.” You do not derive the same excitement as your brother out of the slime thing.

He’s right, though. You’re awesome. The things you can do are awesome. But you can’t shake the feeling that there’s something wrong with you too.

You are used to knowing something’s wrong. That was your childhood, ever since you came back from playing with Bec to find your grandfather slumped over the table in a pool of his own blood. (It’s your fault, but you don’t learn that until later. You lock your door against the blue woman until you realize that’s foolish, and then you wonder why he didn’t leave a note.) Surviving on your own is like playing house on a larger scale. Keep the generators running so you have power, cook your food well so you don’t get sick, learn to take care of your own cuts and bruises when you slip on rocks near the shore. Repair the damage you can, prevent any more, make the best of what cannot be fixed. Remember to smile. You take care of Grandpa’s body after he’s situated in the foyer, and sometimes you check on the girl in the attic too. She’s much taller than you at first, but as the years pass you rise to meet her. You occasionally brush cobwebs off her shoulder and try not to think about how much time you have left.

Because there’s so much to think about! Playing house is one thing, but there’s a whole other world to explore. The Prospitians are kind, and they promise that you have an important destiny. “You will be the Witch,” one tells you, and you giggle.

“The wicked witch?” (Your grandfather owns all of the Oz books, set on a lower shelf where you could reach. You’ve read all of them twice, along with the rest of the children’s books. You’re making your way through his volumes on nuclear physics and engineering now. At first you had to pile up boxes to get to the technical shelves, but you’ve grown tall enough to reach on your own.)

The Prospitian shakes her head. “No. Not you.”

You watch yourself in the clouds sometimes, older and stronger and brave, and you see yourself with your friends. You’re so excited to meet them that you pretend not to notice that the girl in the clouds looks a lot like the dead one upstairs.

You want to tell your friends about what you see sometimes, but you can’t. It’s one more thing you can’t say, like that your grandfather is dead or exactly how you live or how you fall asleep sometimes and it scares you that you can’t control it. (There’s a scar on your leg from when you fell out of a tree once. You thought you broke it, at first, and Bec had to zap you home because you couldn’t crawl back on your own.)

Rose comes the closest to guessing. She’s too polite to come out and say it, and you’re certainly not giving anything away, so you have long conversations where you dance around each other.

TT: I sometimes find it disconcerting that you're so much more aware of my familial situation than I am of yours. How's your grandfather doing? For someone so accomplished, current information on him is scarce.

TT: I haven't even gotten a LinkedIn request from him yet, and the rest of the corporate community has already found its way into my inbox.

TT: Do you think they know I'm twelve?

GG: he is a very private man rose! everyone is entitled to their privacy :)

TT: A polite way of telling me to mind my own business. Don’t worry. I can take a hint.

GG: nooo dont take it like that D: i dont mind you asking but theres really not much to tell

GG: he is just an old man enjoying his retirement on a tropical island

TT: Attended by his loving granddaughter, of course.

GG: of course!

TT: Please know that if you ever do decide to share more, I'm ready to listen.

You thank her for the thought, but you know you never will.

Sometimes you feel like you’re being unfair, that you have too much of an advantage by hoarding the information Skaia gives you and only dispensing a little of it at a time. But when SBURB finally comes, you find out the clouds didn't show you everything, and they couldn't have prepared you for what happens when meteors start raining down.

Prospit, your glorious golden second home, falls, and you are torn in two. One half of you comes back green and ghostly and wailing, and it’s like everything you’ve believed in has been crushed along with her by tons of falling rubble. She is not strong or brave or smiling. She does not put friends and family and duty first, the way you have taught yourself to do, the way you have kept yourself moving forward day after lonely day. Instead she cringes and cries, and the idea that she is part of you – that this part of you is out and alive and talking instead of keeping silent like she deserves – makes you angrier than you have ever been. If there is anything left of her in you, you want to reach inside yourself and pull it out.

The half of you who knows how to keep secrets stays on LOFAF. Dave arrives soon to help you, but he’s different. Everyone is different, but you notice it more with him. It’s the way his tortured metaphors trail off at the ends, the way he keeps checking over his shoulder like he’s looking for something other than frogs.

“You’re acting weird,” you say, readjusting your grip on a frog trying to wriggle its way to freedom. “Weirder than normal.”

He launches into another tangled simile but you frown at him until he stops.  “I’m fine,” he says. “Promise.”

“Cross your heart?” you joke.

He nods and says with a twist in his voice that you don’t think is ironic, “Hope to die.”

You understand later, when he’s coughing out his last breaths on the ground while you try to keep pressure on the bullet holes you put in his chest. You’re crying and gagging and you can feel blood drying in splatters on your shoulder blades, and when Karkat messages you at first you just scream at him. (You killed the first person you’ve seen in years, like you killed your grandfather. Why does this keep happening? What’s wrong with you?) He calms you down, eventually, and tells you what you need to do. Afterward, Jack stares at you. You stare back. When he doesn’t strike, you stand up and toss your rifle as far as you can into the undergrowth. Let it rust there.

You finish the quest with your first kiss still bloody on your lips.

When you merge, you are filled with joy. You are useful. You pluck planets from their orbit and feel the universe turn in time with your heartbeat. The whole of reality brushes your skin with invisible fingertips. On the ship, you make bandages and cook meals and play house again, staying so busy that it’s a week before you wake for the first time sweat-soaked and screaming. Bec left you excellent hearing, and you know when the others have nightmares too. You are whole again, though, and you know how to keep secrets.

You adjust. There’s a brother you never knew you had, and a friend, and populations of entire planets to meet. You take everything bad and imagine it as a ghost-green Jade who you lock away deep inside to sleep for a thousand years, because that’s what witches do. It’s time to allow yourself to be happy. John cuts your hair while you tease him about the new razor nicks on his cheeks. You splash through the water of LOLAR kicking up rainbows. Your second kiss doesn’t taste like blood. The golden walls of your new home fill up with tally marks. One day, you walk past a mirror without having to double check to make sure your eyes aren’t blank.

For a while, you convince yourself, and years of loneliness and secret-keeping drift away to join that ghost-Jade who isn’t, can’t be, a part of you.

(You’re still in her body, like it or not. The one you were born in lies somewhere on LOFAF after you hunted down each corpse, one by one, the day after the game with a shovel and a rag soaked in Rose’s mother’s perfume. Sometimes your skin itches and you want to scratch to see if you find glowing green underneath, to turn your skin inside out and hatch butterfly-like into something new. There are galaxies pushing for space inside your lungs, but they’re not as heavy as your own heartbeat.)

By your third year, no one is talking very much.

Davesprite breaks up with you three days before John’s birthday. He doesn’t use a note at least, though not for lack of trying. You catch him slipping one under your pillow the day after everyone on board jerks awake with the feeling of the universe shattering around them. You shout things at each other, terrible things, and when he says “Maybe you’ll like the real Dave better” you shoot back “Maybe I will” without thinking and something between you snaps like a rubber band pulled too tight. “I’m _sorry_ ,” he says, and he leaves before you can say it back, or say anything at all.

Whatever fragile truce he and your brother had dissolves. They greet each other with tense silences or jabs, and you avoid them both. One day you realize you’ve gone a month without speaking to them beyond answering teleport requests. You’re used to living in silence, but not when you’re surrounded by people who just won’t speak.

When you were ten years old, the three years left in your life stretched out like infinity, and your friends’ words on the computer screen were your entire world. You remember those children and wonder where they went. Maybe you buried them when you buried their guardians. When you walk through the dreambubbles and watch the death spasms of paradox space flickering above you, you wonder how everything around you got so broken.

Even so, it’s better than your dreams.

One morning, you slouch into the ship’s kitchen and snatch some cereal from the cupboard, sitting down at the table without looking at John seated at the other end. He doesn’t say good morning. Neither do you.

‘I killed you in my sleep last night,’ you think at the boy sitting across from you. ‘I grew claws and raked them down your chest. When the blood spilled out, I didn’t feel guilty. Not at all.’

And then in your dream you’d fallen backward in time and landed in your golden tower. Still on Prospit, still a child. You’d seen a shape in the clouds with teeth and claws and ears like yours, cloaked in an aura of green fire. Except this part wasn’t a dream. It was a memory. You’d seen this monster before. Jack Noir, you’d thought, as your session wore on and the scraps and snippets Skaia deigned to show you slotted into place. That night, though, you woke up screaming because it’s not Jack Noir. You recognize it now. It’s you.

You hear someone coming and look up as Davesprite pauses at the doorway. After a moment, he snags something from the fridge and sweeps by John. You don’t catch what he says, but he says something, and John’s eyes narrow.

You don’t have time for this today.

“Shut up,” you say when John opens his mouth. “Both of you just _shut up_.”

You’ve surprised them – you’ve surprised yourself – and they don’t say anything as you storm out of the room.

The problem with dramatic exits is sticking the landing. You wander through the halls for a while and then shut yourself in the bathroom, which is one of the few places where you can trust boys not to barge in without asking. You lean against the wall without turning the light on. You are fifteen years old, but you feel ancient. Maybe that’s how gods are supposed to feel, but you never asked to be a god. You didn’t ask for any of this.

The darkness dissolves your outline into unfamiliar shapes. In the mirror, your reflection looks back, dark-skinned and hollow eyed, and you can see the future hiding in the planes of your face.

Witches are wicked, through and through. You don’t need a ring to make you a monster.

You lean your forehead against the cool surface of the glass and wish you were in one of those bubbles floating in the void far far away, where nothing matters and you can’t hurt anyone at all.


End file.
